OpenID friends

[magycmyste]

Again, hopefully, I didn't miss something I should have read somewhere else, but when I tried giving access to, and subscribing to my friends in livejournal (I manually entered each of their OpenID URLS on the Manage Circle page), it did not add all of them. I noticed that all the ones with an underscore in their name would not add to the circle, but there were others as well, and I'm not sure what those journals might have in common.

Is this a bug, or am I doing something wrong?

Also, I know the friend importer is still being worked on, but when that's available, will I be able to re-import my friends list, and would that have any effect on those who I've added manually? Sorry, lots of questions, and I'm not certain that last bit made sense. It's 4:30 in the morning here.

Comments

[azurelunatic]

Try hyphens for your underscore friends. (Because the internet is weird, sometimes underscores don't work some places, but hyphens do. The technical reason is longer and more boring but basically amounts to that.)

For the other ones, not sure. Could you share an example or two? Maybe they just don't have profiles set up yet.

[magycmyste]

droomdanseres.livejournal.com is one that didn't add. elspethrosemoon.livejournal.com is another.

Most of these journals have had livejournals for at least a few years now.

Thanks! I'll try the underscore-to-hyphen thing. ^_^

EDIT: the underscore-to-hyphen worked for 4 out of the 5 with underscores. Maybe the other one also has the same problem as the others that wouldn't add.

[azurelunatic]

I see that while both of them definitely have LJs, neither of them have an OpenID profile set up on Dreamwidth here. I searched using the search bar set to search for site & user.

There are two ways for an OpenID profile to get set up for someone: when comments belonging to them are imported, or if they sign in themselves at http://www.dreamwidth.org/openid

[magycmyste]

Hmmm.... I guess it's possible that those accounts haven't actually left comments on my journal, specifically, and so wouldn't have had a profile created when I imported my journal. So that makes sense. Thanks!

[matgb]

Um, unless it's been changed, I created a new account when I put a friend in using that, she deleted the extra OpenID. liz-marcs.livejournal.com existed at the same time as liz_marcs.lj.

So it isn't, or at least wasn't, predicated on pre-existing accounts, unless I'm missing something, that account didn't have any comments imported.

[zvi]

You can't create accounts using the manage circle page now, even if you could before.

[matgb]

Ah. Um, isn't that a retrograde step?

I want to be able to point my non-LJ non-DW friends at my journal, OpenID is the best way of them doing that, and it'd be much easier to simply grant them access as and when it occurs to me to do so.

[zvi]

No. Letting you create an account through the manage account page would mean that typos would create empty accounts that go nowhere and no one could claim.

If you've imported comments, everyone who has previously commented to you has an account created, and if they haven't commented, how high are the chances that they're going to comment on a locked post in the future?

[matgb]

typos would create empty accounts

True, but there would be a way of checking out whether that domain exists and has an OpenID delegate defined, which would be an ideal medium term answer.

how high are the chances that they're going to comment on a locked post in the future

Well, obviously, non-existent, if they can't see it they can't comment.

But if you meant "how high are the odds that they might want to see a locked post, or that I may want to point them at one" then the odds are incredibly high.

My LJ is in the top 150 UK blogs across all categories. My fiance's is in the top 50. Both of us get huge numbers of readers from non-LJ sources. Many of those readers are friends or bloggers we'd like to share stuff with using the privacy functions.

If you can't give someone access to your journal before they've created an account on here, unless they chose to blog on here, then the whole 'add friends manually' thing seems incredibly pointless, what's it there for if it's not to allow access to people who've not yet created an account?

I want to be able to tell my friend Alix to go look at a locked post. She has a Wordpress and thus an OpenID. Why can't I just allow that OpenID access in the same way I can a DW account? I can go toa dW hosted blog and allow it access to whatever I like, but not allow a WP hosted blog the same level of access unless that person first faffs about for no benefit to them until I then allow them access after the fact.

Incredibly unintuitive and piss poor UI. Which is why I was so pleased to see those boxes, they make perfect sense.

[zvi]

what's it there for if it's not to allow access to people who've not yet created an account?

I suspect its primary function, back in the sands of LJ time when it was created, was to allow one to manage how accounts appear on the friends page, actually. (You can assign each circle member a foreground and background color, and some styles have those colors appear around the user icon, or the whole entry, or the entry title or something.)

I don't exactly understand why it's a terrible burden for your friend to login to DW before you unlock for them (if you want someone to see a private wordpress entry, for instance, don't they have to create an account on your wordpress blog so they can view it? Also, she's going to have to login with openid in order to see the locked entry; ATM, the authenticated RSS output is password based, which an OpenID account doesn't have), but if you want the behavior changed, submit a bug report on dw_news.

I'm not at all certain you'll get your way. there would be a way of checking out whether that domain exists and has an OpenID delegate defined, which would be an ideal medium term answer. That doesn't seem like it should be possible for a well-behaved server. The openid server is only supposed to positively respond if the person with the account on their service is logged into their service on the client which is sending the request for verification of OpenID identity, right? So, if you ask WP to verify your friend Alix's OpenID, it should say no, shouldn't it?

I mean, I'm sure there must be an API to query Wordpress if an account exists, but OpenID isn't that mechanism. And I'm not sure the headache is worth it for DW, to make the service recognize that exampleusername.blogspot.com is a blogspot account, so we should query Google about the existence of the exampleusername blogspot account, because of all the OpenID servers they won't be able to write a similar rule for. zvilikestv.net doesn't correspond to an account somewhere, for instance. I have a tiny little php program which serves as an OpenID server. But DW knows it's an OpenID, because I logged in here with it one time.